In the Eye of the Wild, Paperback

In the Eye of the Wild begins with a terrifying account of the anthropologist Nastassja Martin's nearly fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear while conducting research in Siberia.

As an anthropologist, Martin has made a name for the fullness of her engagement with the peoples she studies. In her dangerous encounter with the bear, however, she faced something else altogether: the animal.

Left severely mutilated, she undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, whose ghastly chief surgeon sports a mouthful of gold teeth and presides over a harem of young nurses. Back in France, she is put through new operations, meant to fix the work done in Russia, from which she emerges even more damaged.

She comes to the conclusion that she must return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Evens people call it, a miedka, a person who is not only human but beast. That is the only way for her to continue her work as an anthropologist and to reconstitute herself as person.

About author(s):Nastassja Martin is a French author and anthropologist who has studied the Gwich-in people of Alaska and the Even people of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Along with In the Eye of the Wild, she has written Les Âmes sauvages: Face à l'Occident, la résistance d'un peuple d'Alaska, for which she received the Prix Louis Castex of the French Academy.

Sophie Lewis is an editor and a translator from French and Portuguese. She has translated works by Stendhal, Jules Verne, Marcel Aymé, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, and João Gilberto Noll, among others. Her translation of Noémi Lefebvre's Blue Self-Portrait was short-listed for both the Scott Moncrieff Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize in 2018. She lives in London.